A kilo of Summer Sun tomato seeds, sold by Hazera Genetics to tomato farmers in Europe, changes the concept of luxury goods. The kilo sold for $350,000 (!), with which you could have bought 16 kilos of gold and gotten change, too.

Summer Sun tomatoes are rather like cherry tomatoes, but they're more yellow and sweeter too. European retailers hawk them for NIS 100 per kilo, and they get snapped up. An experienced farmer can grow 20 kilos of fruit, on average, from a single seed, which costs NIS 3.50. In short, the seeds are worth their high price.

Tomatomatics

$350,000 1 kilo of Summer Sun seeds
NIS 100  1 kilo of Summer Sun fruit in Europe
NIS 10    Projected price to consumers in 5 years
2 kilos     How much if the Summer Sun seeds sold in Europe last year
1 seed     How much an experienced farmer needs to grow 20 kilos of fruit
6 years    How long Hazera and partners took to develop the seeds
5 years    How long Hazera has before the competition makes one, too

Surprising as it may sound, there are other mega-tomatoes out there whose seeds sell at double Hazera's price. Hazera Tomato division manager Alon Haverfeld: "Even though the price we've gotten for Summer Sun seeds broke all the records, and even though we're playing in the big leagues of seed cultivators, there are seedmakers - mainly Dutch companies - that charge farmers $800,000 per kilo."

In short, the market for specialty seeds isn't a market of dozens of kilos a year. Not many farmers in Europe will risk that much money. The market for specialty tomato seeds is at most 4-5 kilos a year in Europe, of which Hazera sells 2 kilos.

"It's a highly innovative product that doesn't penetrate the market easily," explains Haverfeld. "For some reason, people are repelled by yellow tomatoes. Maybe it looks unripe. But the product is penetrating the market because everybody who tries it, comes back for more." It's taking off in France, a country evidently open to gastronomic innovations, he says.

It took six years for the company and the Rehovot Agricultural Faculty to develop Summer Sun. Developing a new subspecies is expensive, Hazera notes.

From hybrids to engineered

Summer sum is a hybrid, which also means that the fruit itself is sterile. It has no seeds for the next generation. And that means that farmers who want to grow it have to keep buying the seeds from Hazera, and that's where the money lies.

But all periods of exclusivity are doomed to end, and that of fruit and vegetable hybrids is no more than five or six years, until some rival manages to develop a competing product. So the seed companies have just a few years to make their coup, which is another reason for the astronomical prices of new developments, and of the resultant fruit, too. Today Summer Sun sell for NIS 100 per kilo in European groceries. Watch: in five to six years that price will plunge to NIS 10-15.

Until which time, Haverfeld explauins, Hazera will have raced ahead with new developments.

The company has its eye on the global craze for health food. It's working on about ten new lines of peppers and tomatoes, with improved nutritive qualities, from vitamins to minerals to "anti-aging", anti-oxidation compounds such as lycophene.

Naturally, Hazera's main cost is R&D, and now that the controlling interest in the company has been acquired by the French giant Vilmorin Clause & Cie, says Haverfeld, it has greater resources for development. Before the acquisition, Hazera had been owned by kibbutzim and moshavim, and a subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim. They received a company valuation of $91 million, nothing to sneeze at. Why did the French pay so much? Because of the tomato, and the company's ties with academia, explains chief executive Ram Dar.

After buying Hazera, Vilmorin delisted it because of the costs of staying public and the nuisance of having to report each little move to shareholders. Also, it didn't want to divulge more information than absolutely necessary, and wanted freedom for its group seed companies to share information, Dar explains.  Nor does he see Vilmorin refloating it again in the future.

By the way, the future of seed companies isn't in mere mix and match, it?s in genetic engineering, Dar drops a bombshell. "Future vegetables will be engineered. We won't be able to withstand the competition without Vilmorin's umbrella, to supply the technological support during the transition to the new technology." And with the help of Vilmorin and generic engineering, Dar sees Hazera remaining on top, due in part to strains adapted to flourishing in ruined, overly saline earth.